On this walk, I take Monty to the vet. We discuss the proofs for the existence of God, and the meaning of life. And death.
There followed a very difficult few days for the McGowan family. All the options were discussed. Some tears were shed. Not in front of Monty, but I suppose he knew.
The day came and I carried him out in his bag. I looked up from the street and saw Rebecca and Rosie standing together, looking down from the French windows. I waved, but Rosie just put her head on her mother’s shoulder.
Where are we going?
‘The long way round. We’re early.’
It’s that place, isn’t it?
I stroked Monty’s nose.
Everything we’ve talked about on these walks…
‘Yeah?’
Well, it’s all been very interesting. I think I understand more about what sort of stuff there is in the world, and what counts as knowing about it. And I suppose I’ve got a better idea of what it means to be a good dog. Or person. But the thing is, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I thought there’d be more of the Big Stuff.
‘You’re talking about the Meaning of Life kind of thing?’
Yeah, I guess.
‘We talked a little about what you call the Big Stuff on our ethics walk. Aristotle’s idea of happiness meaning leading the life most suitable to a rational animal, a life of contemplation, lived in accordance with the virtues… Or Kant’s conception of moral goodness, using your reason to discover the rules that any rational being must obey. Or even the utilitarian life, spent striving always to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. All of these have a nobility. And certainly, any of them will enable you to lead a more ethical life than either just following your whims and fancies, or not troubling yourself at all about right and wrong.’
I can see that. And if the question was what should I do, or how should I act, then fair enough, the ethics stuff helps. But I’m asking a different question. Not what should I do, but what does it mean?
I dipped my head to his head, and breathed in the smell of his fur. My wife had washed him, and he was smelling much better than usual. He curled his tongue up to lick my face.
‘You know what the early Wittgenstein would say to that, don’t you?’
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
‘He certainly put this sort of question into the thereof one must be silent box. And I think on this one he’s right. The question What does life mean? is a category mistake.’
Just this once, can we skip the jargon?
‘Sorry. I think the word “meaning” only has a meaning in relation to propositions. The bus is coming. I like cheesecake. The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. These are all propositions, and they have a meaning. Meaning is a language thing. But a flower, a bumblebee, a little scruffy dog, a big scruffy man, these things don’t have a meaning. They have value, and value is more important than meaning.’
What about God? Most of your philosophers had something to say about him, or it, or her.
‘I’ve tiptoed around God a bit in our talks. Partly because I’m with Kant: I just don’t think philosophy helps us much. True, philosophers spent a lot of time and ingenuity trying to prove God exists, but no one has yet come up with a proof strong enough to convert an atheist to a believer.’
What are these proofs?
‘There have been dozens, over the centuries, but I think they boil down to three basic types: cosmological proofs, arguments from design and the ontological argument. We’ve only got time for the quick and dirty versions…
The cosmological proofs take a few different forms. One is the idea that everything has a cause, and so there must be a first cause that isn’t itself caused, or else you have an infinite chain. Sometimes it’s put in the language of a first mover – everything that is moved is moved by something else, and you need a first mover to get the ball rolling. It’s also sometimes expressed as the idea that everything in our universe is contingent – it could exist, or it might not. It exists, so it must exist for a reason, and that reason is God. One of the most straightforward formulations is set out as a simple syllogism: Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe had a cause.’
And what’s wrong with these?
‘As you recall, Kant and Hume had both questioned the idea of a cause. Or Hume questioned it, and Kant made it a quality of the human intellect, rather than something out there that could be regarded as God. No cause: no God. Others have argued there’s simply nothing illogical about the idea of an infinite causal chain, without a first mover. Others have said that the proof doesn’t really prove anything: it begins by saying everything must have a cause, and ends by positing a thing without a cause, so it’s self-contradictory. As for a first mover, how can a thing that does not move impart motion? Another objection is that even if you did prove some sort of first cause, what makes us think it has any of the other qualities we ascribe to God – omniscience, omnipotence, love?
I think it’s ultimately futile to wonder about this one. Science has given us the Big Bang, a moment of creation. Before the Big Bang we have no idea what was going on. Was there another universe that had expanded and contracted down to a point, and then burst back to life? Or was there nothing? I think all we can do is hand it over to the scientists and then try our hardest to understand and criticize what they come up with.
Next, we have the argument from design. This basically says that there are elements of our world that are so perfectly constructed that they cannot be the result of chance – any more than a watch could be built by chance – but must have been designed by the Divine Watchmaker. There’s nothing wrong, philosophically, with this argument. Unfortunately, as it’s the only argument for the existence of God that has any claim to being scientific, it has to come up against reality. Its proponents argue that something as wondrous as the eye, which relies on several different complex elements working in harmony, could not have resulted from chance, any more than a tornado blowing through a junkyard could make a Boeing 747. Then along came Darwin, and evolution was shown to be a process that was quite capable of creating an eye – indeed the eye has been “invented” many times over in the Earth’s history. And there are still many eyes in the animal world at the different stages of development – from eyes that can do nothing more than distinguish light from dark, to the eagle’s eye that can see a flea move on your back from a kilometre away.’
She de-flead me this morning. I don’t know why she bothered.
‘It makes her happy. And you do smell nice… Where were we… oh, yes, the argument from design. All you need is time, and random variation, and then natural selection will make your watch, I mean eye. Coming at it from the other side, the more we investigate the natural world, the more we find things are far from perfect. I don’t even mean from an anthropological view: the superabundance of things like fleas and mosquitos and bedbugs and viruses that make life unpleasant. We’ve said that evolution is able to work wonders, but it had to work those wonders with the materials at hand. The palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould was very good at finding examples of this “making do” aspect of evolution. My favourite is the panda’s thumb. Pandas eat bamboo. What you really want with bamboo is an opposable digit – a thumb – to help you manipulate it. God would have given the panda a decent thumb. Perhaps just moved its first claw around a bit, job done. But the actual panda has a different and, frankly, rather botched solution. One of the bones in its wrist has grown out, and achieved a limited degree of flexibility and articulation. It kind of works, in a just-aboutgetting-by sort of way, because the panda couldn’t just summon up the perfect mutation. It had to wait till one day a panda was born with a slightly projecting wrist bone, which was a little help with the old bamboo, which gave it a slight survival advantage over the other totally thumbless pandas, and so it had a few more babies, each with the same rubbish little proto-thumb. And each generation threw up random variations, and every now and then that would include a slightly improved thumb.’
So the argument from design hits the dust.
‘Yeah, it’s not needed for the fancy stuff, and there are better explanations for all the botching and making-do that we can see in the natural world. Plus, well, you know, Ebola…
So finally we have the ontological argument, and I’ve got to say that I’m oddly fond of this one.’
It’s that word ontological, isn’t it?
‘What’s not to love?’
Hit me, then.
‘I’m going to give you a definition of “God”. God is the thing greater than which nothing can be conceived. Got that?’
I think so. He’s the Greatest.
‘Now I want you to imagine two Gods. They are exactly the same in greatness, except that one exists, and one doesn’t.’
Huh?
‘You just need the idea of two Gods, both great, but one’s real and one’s made up.’
OK…
‘Now which of them is greater?’
I think I see where this is going. Obviously, I’m supposed to say that of those two Gods, the one that exists must be greater.
‘Therefore God must exist! We’ve accepted that God is the greatest thing you can conceive of, and seen that a God that exists must be greater than one that doesn’t, therefore God must exist.’
You’re kidding me, right?
‘This is more or less the version first put forward by the Scholastic philosopher St Anselm (1033–1109). There are a few slightly different versions of it, but they all have this in common, that existence is part of the idea of God, in the way that “the angles add up to 180 degrees” is part of the idea of a triangle.’
This is the nuttiest thing you’ve told me. You’re going to put it out of its misery, aren’t you?
‘It’s been weirdly resilient. No one is really happy with it, but it won’t lie down. What I like about it is the way it’s a purely conceptual proof. It doesn’t touch on anything in the world at all, relying on nothing more than some harmless-sounding definitions, and your acceptance of them. But there have been a couple of ways of attacking it. Kant had one. He said that the proof relies on “existence” being simply one of the predicates that you can attach to a subject – God is all-powerful, omniscient and he exists. So you might say that a sofa is blue and comfy and that it exists, and that blue, comfy and existence are all predicates of the sofa. But Kant says that existence simply isn’t a predicate. A predicate must add an extra something to your knowledge of the subject. But existence, or being, simply tells you that the thing exists in reality. I can’t quite decide about this, though most philosophers agree with Kant. To me it seems that if I was being told about a character who I assumed to be fictional, and then I was told, “no, she really exists”, I’d think that existence was a predicate. Perhaps a better attack is one that makes the ontological argument sound silly. Is it possible to imagine a dog more perfect than which none could be conceived?’
A-hem…
‘You’re a lovely boy, but not quite perfect. It’s impossible to be absolutely perfect in reality. There’s always some tiny flaw, like stealing cheesecake… Anyway, I want you to imagine that perfect dog, the one more perfect than which none could be conceived. Done that?’
I’m trying.
‘Now, if that dog doesn’t exist, it’s not the most perfect one of which you could conceive. Because one that existed would be more perfect. We can conceive of the perfect one that exists, therefore it exists! We’ve proved the existence of the perfect dog.’
But there is no perfect dog.
‘Precisely.’
We walked along for a few more minutes in silence. I still had some time to kill, so we were winding a little aimlessly through the backstreets. But each one took us closer to our destination.
You’re trying to take my mind off things, aren’t you? All that God stuff, I mean.
‘Maybe. But we’re not there yet, are we, in finding the meaning.’
You said meaning was for words, not lives. The category mistake.
‘Perhaps I was being a bit pedantic.’
You think?
‘A couple of things come to mind. There’s a novel, Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham.’
Good title.
‘It is, and it’s one perfect for our walks – he took it from Spinoza’s Ethics. It’s Spinoza’s term for the way humans are enslaved by their passions. Maugham’s fallen out of fashion, now, but it’s still a fine book. In it, there’s a point when the hero, Philip Carey, an aspiring artist, is in Paris. A friend gives him an old Persian rug, telling him that it contains the meaning of life. He carries it around with him through the years, never really knowing what the friend, or the carpet, meant. He never quite achieves his aims in life, never quite finds happiness. His love affairs are unsatisfactory at best, tragic at worst. He settles for a career that he never really wanted. Finally, understanding dawns, and he sees what the friend meant by the gift of the rug. The meaning of life is the pattern we weave.’
Huh?
‘The pattern doesn’t point to anything beyond itself. It isn’t a sign, or an index or an icon, it’s just a play of geometric shapes and colours. Those shapes and colours might be complex and intricate, or might be simple and direct. But we weave it for the joy of weaving, and at the end we find that we’ve created something beautiful, in the life lived, in the warp and the weft.’
I like that. You said a couple?
‘Most of the philosophers we’ve been discussing were OK as people, and some, like Spinoza, lived quietly exemplary lives. Leibniz was a toady, but not a bad man. Nietzsche’s bark was worse than his bite. Heraclitus sounds like a jerk but, who knows, down in the tavern he may have been a riot, and no one deserves his ending… But Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) really was a shit. Mean, miserable, arrogant. He lived only for his own pleasure and comfort. Typical Schopenhauer story: in 1821 he was enraged by an old woman making a racket outside his apartment, so he threw her down the stairs. She was seriously injured and unable to work, and the courts forced Schopenhauer to pay her a small pension for the rest of her life. When she finally died, some twenty years later, Schopenhauer celebrated with a grim little Latin pun, “Obit anus, abit onus” (the old woman dies, the debt departs).’
Nice man.
‘Schopenhauer’s philosophy was as grim as his personality. We are driven, he said, by a blind force that compels us to strive towards goals that can never be fully satisfied. Our bodies are nothing but the material manifestations of this drive: our teeth and bowels the embodiment of our hunger, our fists the material form of our rage. The only thing that can bring us relief from this tireless striving is art. When we listen to music, or gaze at a painting, the will is quieted, and we are temporarily sheltered from the storm.’
This isn’t cheering me up much, you know, if that was what you were trying to do…
‘Oh, sorry, yes, I only mentioned Schopenhauer because, despite the pessimism, he’s one of the few philosophers with a nice turn of phrase. Towards the end of his main work, The World as Will and Representation (1818), he writes that despite the anguish and torment of life, we carry on. It’s like a soap bubble, which we blow out as long and as large as we can, even though we know it must burst. I think for Schopenhauer, the bubble was just a symbol for evanescence, something that is destined to perish soon, but the metaphor has slipped out of his control. Is anything more perfect than a soap bubble, anything that so combines unity, variety and harmony, as great art is supposed to do? Each soap bubble is perfect, yet each one entirely unique. And do they not delight us? Who does not smile as the bubble grows, and sigh a little when it pops? So maybe that’s it. We want those who behold—’
Behold?
‘… OK, see us, we want them to smile and then to sigh.’
Tone?
‘Yeah?’
The bubble thing, not really doing it for me.
‘One last try, then. As I said, I don’t believe it makes sense to talk about our lives having a meaning. We have a value, which is measured, I think, in how much we’re loved, and how far we’ve earned that love. And you, little dog, have been greatly loved, and that love has been earned by the love you’ve given us.’
If dogs could blush, I’d blush.
‘But there’s another thing. Remember the telos, the purpose that Aristotle thinks is the final cause?’
I switched off a little for Aristotle, but, yeah, vaguely.
‘The great thing about being human, er, I mean rational, is that we can choose our purpose, decide why we’re here, and what we should make of our lives. It’s quite close to the existentialist view, put forward by Jean Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943). For an object like a chair or a hammer, Sartre tells us, the idea of the object comes before the existence of the object. His way of putting it is that essence precedes existence. But for us, we rational creatures, humans, and clever little dogs, existence precedes essence. We have both the ability and the duty to decide what sort of a thing we are.
Sartre’s position was a direct response to Spinoza’s determinism. For Spinoza, if you remember, the universe is an irresistible determining force, and the best we can hope for is to understand it and acquiesce. The way to escape our human bondage, for Spinoza, is to comprehend the nature of our chains. Or, to give it a more sympathetic interpretation, it is to see that we are surfers on a wave, and that the best way to live is to go with the wave, becoming one with its majestic, impersonal, indifferent drive. But Sartre says that the human thing is not to ride the wave, but to choose to stand amid the breakers, to breast them, and then walk out, even unto the maelstrom.’
Unto, really?
‘Oh, sorry. This meaning of life thing can wreak havoc with your prose. But I think there’s something there. We should decide on our purpose, and because we are, as Aristotle said, a social animal, it should be a purpose that we can justify and defend, one that should aim to make the world a little better, or, heck, a lot better. There are the small jobs we can do well, making those we love safe and happy, or not unsafe and not unhappy, if that is the limit of our abilities. And then there are the big jobs, at which we’ll fail; but then, we can try again, and—’
Fail better.
‘You said it, buddy.’
And then Monty saw where we were, and he struggled, weakly, in his special bag. I comforted him as best I could, and we entered the vets.
I spoke to the young woman at reception, and she asked me to sit. I took Monty out of his bag, and he sat quietly on my knee, trembling a little. The lights were harsh, and so I put my hand over his face, and spoke some words, and felt his eyes close under my palm.
There was an old man with a threadbare cat in a basket, and a father and a daughter and a something in a shoebox with holes punched in it. I smiled at the girl, and she swung her legs and smiled back. I didn’t think her hamster or whatever it was would be in too much trouble.
And then it was our turn.
The vet was a small, dark woman called Vesna, from somewhere in the Balkans.
‘Can I stay?’ I asked.
‘Is best to not,’ she answered. ‘Come back after, when is done.’
I went and sat on the Green, where I’d taken him for so many quick walks, on days too miserable to go further afield, or when I was too busy. There’s a quaint, old-fashioned fire station just over the road, and the crews were out washing the trucks. The kids used to love the station when they were small, and as a treat I’d take them down to say hello to the firefighters, who’d sometimes let them sit in the cab, the big yellow helmets on their little heads. And I thought about the years passing, and Monty joining our family and, having stupidly come out without a hanky, I wiped my streaming eyes and nose on my cuffs.